#kaijune 2023

[salamispots]

did a fun collab with @flancortes for kaijune! :3 creature design/final sketch by flan, colors/lineart by me

[connor-dioda]

Ugly Sonic finds a kindred spirit.

[nazrigar]

Kaijune 2023: Extra Large Angelic Beings

So, far Kaijune, I’ve been drawing some updates to settings I haven’t drawn in a loooooong while.

In the universe of Pantheons, Angels and Gods exist alongside mortals, set in a distant far flung future. Among angels, Zaphkiel, lord of Ophanim (and an extreme doormat who’s too nice for his own good) is the biggest angel by a large margin.

Alongside mythology’s deities, so too are their monsters. The Chalkydri in particular are the only form of Angelic wildlife, as they are every bit as animalistic as one would see a tiger in the wild, but scaled FAR larger and made of the same star matter and hard light angels are.

[eternal-gromnommer]

In celebration of this year's Kaijune, I decided to re-watch Pacific Rim: Uprising to check if it really was as bad as everyone was claiming it was and I remember it being.

It...kinda was.

Heaps of wasted opportunities, character arcs that went nowhere, random pointless death of Mako Mori (boo!) and a whole new cast of teens who have little appeal and just rehash the story beats of the first film.

Which is a shame, because it did have a lot of cool ideas that could have been better-executed. Like the hybrid-drones, or Obsidian Fury, the kaiju-brain controlled Jaeger.

But by far the biggest wasted opportunity was the rather bland and underwhelming Mega Kaiju, which just looked like a bigger Kaiju with the component parts barely evident. So for Kaijune I whipped up a redesign of how I'd try to make it look more distinct and have the component parts accounted for.

Raijin, Hakuja and Shrikethorn remain mostly unchanged, just with more distinct palettes to highlight the patchwork nature of the fusion and with a reduced number of digits to make the fused limbs less cluttered.

The centerpiece of the Mega Kaiju head is Raijin's inner head, with Shrikethorn's inverted upper jaw now forming the lower jaw and Raijin and Shrikethorn's original lower jaws forming a "collar" around the neck. Hakuja's head is split entirely in half to form "horns" and the tusked lower jaw similarly bisected to form "mandibles". Raijin's four head-plates are all present, with the bottom two on the chest and the top two forming a crest atop the fused head. Ten eyes from Shrikethorn, six from Hakuja and sixteen from Raijin add up to a total of 32: way more than canon!Mega Kaiju's ten.

The redesigned Mega Kaiju also has eight limbs instead of six. The two main forearms are a fusion of Shrikethorn and Raijin's arms, while a smaller pair on the chest are Hakuja's intact frontmost limbs. The two pairs of hind legs are Hakuja's four back legs, with the middle pair fused to Raijin's legs and the back pair fused to Shrikethorn's legs. Hakuja's dorsal armor plates now stand up like spikes on the Mega Kaiju's back, and the tails are partly Raijin and partly Shrikethorn, with Hakuja armor plates forming spear-like tips.

And finally, as a stitched-together Frankensteined kaiju, the seams are still clearly visible, made from the ripper drones that tore apart the three components and sewed them up into one. The seams and stitches occasionally leak blue kaiju blood now and then: furthering the Mega Kaiju design as a mutilated, tortured monstrosity, clearly not designed to survive very long and merely live long enough to wreck its immediate foes, reach Mount Fuji, and jump inside to its death to fulfill the Precursors' master plan to trigger a massive eruption and cause a mass extinction event.

[neobiohazardus]

Kaijune 2023 - Day 30: Scour

Kaijune 2023 - Day 30: Mascot

Alright, the grand finale! This one took the most time to design for sure. Pretty proud of it actually. Here's a link to the prompt list I used this year

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Bio: Interrupting a kaiju attack in a heavily populated city in Canada, Kyphor appeared with a large, strange-looking kaiju in tow. Not doing anything themselves, this kaiju shot out a large beam of light towards the kaiju, atomizing it on the spot. Trucks soon appeared, having the same colour pattern as Kyphor and this strange kaiju. Modifying the gravity around the trucks, Kyphor lifted them into the air, allowing an armor-clad humanoid to get a high vantage point in order to announce their presence.

Calling their group "The Ascent", they spoke in a robotic voice towards the crowd that had gathered around the strange kaiju. Apparently being part of a defunct portion of the KDF, The Ascent say they helped them in designing their biomechanical kaiju named Ganis'i, and that their new design, "Scour", was a further improvement off of that. The Ascent espoused themselves as being the true scientific protectors of mankind, able to improve on all of the designs that came before, and urging people to join them.

After this showing, both Kyphor and Scour have been seen worldwide, sometimes hours apart on opposite sides of the globe. Further investigations into their inner workings have shown that their machines apparently use something they call "Royal Flesh", these apparently coming from the dead Cursed King kaiju that they've harvested (likely from the Seige Dragons), this flesh being easy to adhere to machinery and interfacing readily with any type of circuitry, additionally using titanima and the unnamed green crystals found on ancient machines.

Though The Ascent have gotten backlash for using Royal Flesh, material, the KDF have come under more fire for hiding their use of the material in their Ganis'i mech, the discourse erupting almost immediately after The Ascent's global debut.

The KDF have remained entirely silent after the incident, Eco-K being quite angry with The Ascent, as they dispatch kaiju without mercy or worry about the ecological role they might play, but this very efficacy has proven effective at garnering online fans of The Ascent.

[ardentrob]

KAIJUNE 2023 (cont.d) [prev / next]

Day 21 - Machine Day 22 - Trap Day 23 - Variant Day 24 - Tailed

[titleknown]

KAIJUNE: VIRGIN KILLER

...Look, I'm under no illusions on where I'm going after this.

I took this job for the money, but do you think God gives a shit? Do you think God in the book of Life and Death, is gonna give an exemption for "He did it for the paycheck" ?

No, I know I'm going to hell in a few hours. Hopefully the black box finds its way to better people than me so they know why.

We were mining, for some miracle substance, well before the big monster wave, though they loved to use that as justification for exploiting this big-deal resource after they started, even if we were bleeding money and men from some of the same.

The shit we were digging for, I can see why that madman kept at it, even after he was impaled on that golden horn. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but ah forgetit. This stuff was amazing, there's a lot of varieties of it, and we gave it a lot of nicknames, Ambrosia, Wishalloy, Unobtanium, the one that stuck the most was Liquid God, even if most of it was as solid as the shits I took when they started feeding us those MREs.

I got in because I was a hot-shit materials engineer wnting to be a big shot, again God doesn't care but you might as well know. First thing we shoulda known something was wrong was the wind. Now, I barely know shit about caving, but I know that fucking rainstorms don't happen underground. At least, not this often, I don't know, maybe there's a fluke somewhere, but the weather was bullshit. I'm pretty sure most lightning isn't red, and I'm pretty sure there's never been fucking hail the size of a human skull underground.

The second thing was, of course, the monsters. Some of 'em made the news after they got out, I remember the batshit panic everyone made over the shit with Mr Krinkle and Mr Brownstone. Of course, you wouldn't have known that they came from here, if the bosses had their way. which they always did.

We had a betting pool for which excuses they'd use this time. Less people used it than the one for how many people'd die this time, in hundreds. I would say it was due to the wear of the shit, but no, we were pricks.

And now the big mama's out. The one we couldn't hide away or lie about. You know, it's funny, we used to call ourselves the Virgin Killers, penetrating the soil for that hot hot Liquid God. I suppose it's ironic that we gave it that codename before the shit really hit the fan. I'd imagine the press picked it up.

You know, you start to think you're invincible once you push back a few beast into "someone else's fucking problem" territory with construction equipment. But then you meet the shit below the earth that's beyond a fucking bulldozer's ability to handle. The hurricane, the thunder and the lightning, the fucking Alastor.

I hear DW Devlin's here on the story. Great guy, amazing reporter, better man than me, though that's not saying much. If he finds the black box before the corpos do, I have this to say to him: We knew we were killing her babies.

They weren't even a threat to us. The one good thing I can ever say I did was to say no when they gave the orders. And the worst thing I did was to do it anyway after they pointed the gun at me. Something tells me they don't have good intentions for the Liquid God.

And now, the Virgin Killer's coming to kill the kid-killers. I feel a cold wind. I see the red lightning. Honestly, I can't blame her. I hope I die quick at leas-

-Recording recovered from emergency-recording black box at site [REDACTED] by D.W. Devlin

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Welcome to "Kaijune But It's In September" y'all! I've been preparing this for a while now, and I'm pleased as punch to be finally showing it off!

I made it with real models, real dioramas (thanks to my local gaming store), and god did that take forever to pull off! especially for some of the later ones, god I need to pre-prep them next time.

It's in a different universe to my older Kaijune stuff for the record, a bit darker and more down-to-earth. If my older kaijune stuff was about a society that handled the emergence of these creatures well, this one's about a world that... didn't.

I also decided to do microfiction instead of character profiles, if only because it's probably more compelling to read as an introduction, and I'm pleased as punch with how it came out!

There's a few notes I may as well give that didn't fit into the epistolary format of the fiction, so:

Ability Notes: Virgin Killer is mainly specialized in controlling weather, as implied by the story, creating huge storms of varying effects for both concealment and additional avenues of attack, the lightning produced by these storms is red, as mentioned, tho often she also uses wind projected from her tail.

Also, if that tail stings you... well, let's just say you really don't want to be stung by that tail. I can only summarize what happens as "meteorological body-horror" and leave it at that.

Bonus Trivia: Despite the efforts of that mining crew, some of her babies survived. She does not know this.

And, in that grand (exceedingly late) Kaijune tradition, this character and all related narrative elements are under a CC-BY 4.0 license, as long as I, Thomas F Johnson, am credited as their creator.

Have fun!

[louiejoyce]

Felt only natural to follow up Godzilla with… Gamera!!!

www.louiejoyce.com

[gaynudibranch]

biollante for the second day of kaijune

[indragonsaur]

Behemoth

[zelly-raptor]

09/06/2023: Kaijune 2023 day 09- Tar.

My heart wasn't really into Drawing a Tar monster or a Kaiju drowning in a Tar put. So I just drew a Slime monster instead.

This is Globularr (formerly known in Glob) a Slime monster though some of you might have worked that out by now... Although he wasn't always. Globularr/Glob was once a Humanoid Kaiju that got in a Scrap with Jazzilla. Jazzilla of course won and pushed Glob into a pond of mysterious Ooze.

And then a Bizarre transformation took place. The Ooze absorbed Glob causing the two organisms to become one.. The ever so Menacing "Globularr".

Globularr stands at a rather "Short" 10ft and weighs in at 421ltr (you know with him being a Liquid). His Liquid form is able to squash and stretch. Plus he's able to fire slugs of slime at people and animals which when the slime goes inside one of his Victims he's able to control their body.

Globularr also grows bigger the more Ooze and Toxic materials he comes into contact with.

Bonus bits...

[zinzabee]

Hey, uh...

What are the prompts for KaiJune???

Just curious

Spooks, a Wandering Scribe (please don't feel forced to answer-)

I don't ever actually do the prompts myself, I just draw as much kaiju content as I please. But here is the official list, posted today!

[storm-ismyusername]

Make room for Kaijune!!!

[treebeef2]

Kaijune 2023 - Day 9 - "Levitation"

Kept stalling and restarting the day 1 prompt so I've decided to do the prompts as they come rather than try and catch up.

Using Flancortes' prompt list.

[kyjuthekaiju]

First kaiju for kaijune: Ryu from my friend @ARTofNMH on twitter! I love him v much, one of my fav kaiju ocs ever! He’s such a sweetie, so I thought looking up at him through sakura trees was fitting :3.

Happy kaijune 2023! I’ll be working on more kaiju art when I can!!

[neobiohazardus]

Kaijune 2023 - Day 25: Ranslouss

Kaijune 2023 - Day 25: Cloud

I knew I wanted to make a kaiju like this as soon as I added the cloud prompt. Here's a link to the prompt list if you want to follow along.

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Bio: Found in the skies above Malaysia, Ranslouss was not found by any larger organization, and was instead found by civilians during a normal flight.

One of the largest non-sessile kaiju, Ranslouss is one of a species, satellite imaging of the incident around Malaysia showing that the kaiju have been showing up in images since the satellites have been put into place, the kaiju easily blending into the clouds on the images. Further observation has found that they seem to subsist off of cloud-born planktonic organisms, and also off of whatever Phelstielle eats. Although their eyes are usually pointed down, Ranslouss will flip over when under Phelstielle, snapping at the bottom of their tendrils whenever they get the chance.

These observations have also confirmed that, rather than having invisible organs, the kaiju's organs have the same index of refraction as their translucent skin, giving them the appearance of being a hollow tube. The only actually clear part of the kaiju is its skull, where their eyes peek through their skin.